The Idee Blog

TinEye and plugins

2009-11-13T17:31:49Z

We spend a significant amount of time in the Ideeplex looking over and analyzing data. We work with extremely large data sets (images typically) and it is always interesting to see what rises up to the surface once you dive in.

Our image search engine TinEye is used by a lot of people and it is interesting (for us) to see the browsers used to access TinEye. Since we launched a TinEye Firefox add-on, we received a lot of requests to develop plugins for other browsers particularly Opera, Safari and Chrome. However the bulk of our visitors are Firefox and IE users. Looking at the data our plugin development plan is pretty wrapped up! We can now go and focus on other things (such as TinEye APIs!).

Incidentally the TinEye Firefox add-on is getting close to 400,000 downloads! I want to see the 1 million download before the year end…

Operation Komando!

2009-10-19T14:27:11Z

Thanks TinEye fans for making us a Kim Komando cool website of the day! May be you are not familiar with Kim Komando? She is a digital goddess! Seriously:

Kim’s weekly three-hour call-in talk radio show is heard (via her own national radio network called WestStar) on over 450 stations. In addition, she does a Digital Minute radio feature five days a week; has written ten books about life in the digital age; sends out close to 7 million e-mail newsletters weekly; and authors a widely syndicated newspaper column, which also runs in USA Today.com.

and she has taken the time to review TinEye! Yay! Oh I know what I want next: to have our TinEye Firefox add-in featured in the Kim Komando downloads. We are so greedy at the TinEye HQ.

The truth and nothing but the truth: Shepard Fairey lies.

2009-10-17T23:58:20Z

Via Techcrunch:

Striking at the heart of his fair use case against the AP, Shepard Fairey has now been forced to admit that he sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used to make the Hope and Progress posters. Mr. Fairey has also now admitted to the AP that he fabricated and attempted to destroy other evidence in an effort to bolster his fair use case and cover up his previous lies and omissions.

The evidence of which photograph Mr. Fairey has used is right here in a combination of human analysis (good old fashioned research) and image recognition analysis. Mr. Shepard Fairey has used Mannie Garcia’s photograph to create his iconic image. I am not sure the fair use movement is going to want Mr. Shepard Fairey as its poster man!

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-10-12T15:29:02Z

Here in Canada we are celebrating Thanksgiving today so our offices are closed.

[via wikipedia]: The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Pacific Ocean. Frobisher’s Thanksgiving was not for harvest but homecoming. He had safely returned from a search for the Northwest Passage, avoiding the later fate of Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. The feast was one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations by Europeans in North America. Frobisher was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him — Frobisher Bay.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

TinEye Firefox Plugin = Awesomesauce

2009-10-06T20:49:21Z

What you make is important

We thought enabling you to search for an image using an images was the apogée of search. The nec plus ultra, the ultimate … well you get my drift. Using TinEye you still had to upload an image or feed TinEye a URL. For those of you still unfamiliar with TinEye (how is that possible?):

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. For some real TinEye search examples, check out our Cool Searches page.

So to make life even easier for you, we created a series of TinEye plugins. And it looks like you guys just totally love our TinEye Firefox plugin: we surpassed 250,000 downloads, and that’s only since we started counting! My team tells me that we are way way beyond that. But hey, we are sticking to the public numbers! And as of this post they are actually getting closer to 300,000 downloads!

And boy this also makes us a top download!

Thanks for spreading the word about the TinEye Firefox plugin. Help us reach the ONE MILLION download! That’s a milestone we are going to celebrate in the ideeplex! Thanks for helping out get the word out:

@shanselman

@JazMinderr

and everyone who keeps tweeting about TinEye.

Photoshelter partners with TinEye

2009-09-30T18:24:00Z

What happens when you mix two really great things together? Generally, something super-great.

And that’s why the TinEye team is excited to announce our partnership with the good folks over at Photoshelter, a leader in portfolio websites, photo sales and archiving tools for photographers.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll be adding the entire Photoshelter image collection to the TinEye search index, making it easy for TinEyers to find Photoshelter photographers as well as identify them as the original author of an image. Plus we’ll be keeping up to date by adding any new Photoshelter images to the TinEye index as they are introduced. Pretty neat, eh?

Check out Photoshelter’s TinEye announcement on their website, and stay tuned to TinEye for some lovely Photoshelter images coming soon!

Update: Check out Photoshelter’s recent blog post, explaining the partnership in more detail.

Maintenance to TinEye

2009-08-20T19:34:19Z

Folks, TinEye is getting an oil change and so he may be periodically unavailable over the next few days. The website may be unreachable for a few moments or even a couple of hours at a time, but don’t worry–we are fixing him up real nice and he’ll be purring like a kitten when he’s out of the shop. Thanks for your patience!

Search Flickr Creative Commons by colour

2009-08-10T18:03:28Z

Our multicolr lab is certainly a Flickr + Crayloa baby. Go play here. Don’t say I did not warn you: you will spend many colorful hours forgetting about all the work on your plate this Monday!

Thanks @AnneLikesRed, @carolynsewell and @katieobriendc

TinEye on CNN

2009-08-05T23:58:11Z

TinEye, our reverse image search engine, ended up on CNN with Kyra Phillips. Lucky TinEye!

During this segment, CNN’s Kyra Phillips talks to virtual safety expert Christine Durst about protecting your family photos online. Have a listen:

Surprising what TinEye can unearth, like say an older photograph of Kyra Phillips being used on a Latin American online clinic website!

Wikimedia Commons & TinEye

2009-07-08T14:33:36Z

Since the launch of TinEye, we have had a great response from the Wikimedia Commons image community. Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free-content files, including images, that are either in the public domain or released under free licenses. These images are used in many of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects, including Wikipedia.

Anyone can contribute to Wikimedia Commons, and the project is driven by volunteers; while they are careful to respect image copyright, researching the license for each image that is submitted can be a challenge. To aid in this effort, members of Wikimedia Commons have created automated plugins and image checkers driven by the TinEye search engine, to help research photos and locate the source of images.

For an interesting browse, check out Wikimedia Commons member Shizhao’s TinEye bot, which allows you to see all of the interesting images that have been uploaded to the Commons and been detected elsewhere on the web by TinEye.